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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

It’s re-run time. This week’s presents the three principles IT managers (and, for that matter, non-IT managers) need most if they’re going to do their jobs well.

It is, by the way, the first “IS Survival Guide” ever published. It appeared in InfoWorld January 8, 1996, and I’m delighted to report that even after twenty years, if you’re going to limit things to just three management principles I can’t come up with a better list.

– Bob

KJR News Line

Welcome to the IS Survival Guide, the column that asks, “How can anyone succeed at such a bizarre job?”

You’re responsible for technology traditional IS executives still wish would just go away. You manage the most eccentric employees in the company. You deal with vendors who constantly use terms like partnership and value-added. And while this all goes on, you end up on five committees to advance the management long-term-direction-of-the-year.

Think of this column as management with an edge.

You won’t find any 7-S Paradigms here. No facile graphs that encapsulate a whole industry into four quadrants. No seductive alternatives to the hard work of being an effective manager. No panaceas.

Here’s what you will get: Suggestions and ideas that come from years of real management and executive experience managing technology; conversations with other managers and executives; discussions and debates with consultants, writers and academics; and just plain reading and thinking.

A lot comes from real-world experience of what works well. A lot more comes from real-world experience of what didn’t work so well.

Let’s get started.

The Three Principles of Management

A lot of management comes down to just three basic principles. Understanding them is easy. Applying them is harder. They are:

  • Customers — paying, external customers — define value.
  • Form follows function.
  • Everyone involved must be aligned to a common purpose.

When things go seriously wrong, you usually find something that violates one or more of these simple propositions.

Future columns will often touch back to these principles. Some will cover them in depth. Here are the Cliff’s Notes.

Customers

Customers define value, by exchanging something else they value — money — for your product or service. (A commonly misused term, value-added, is simply the difference between the cost of raw materials and revenue from goods sold.)

Paying customers define value. Internal customers (a nasty oxymoron) do not define value (or quality, which is just one component of value). How can they, when they don’t pay.

The usual definition — anybody whose inbox receives the contents of your outbox — reveals the core fallacy. Customers make buying decisions. And unless your internal customers establish your capital and operating budget, they aren’t the people who make the buying decisions for your products and services.

Always find a way to link your priorities and plans to paying, external customers, or at least to the hot-buttons of your company’s top executives.

Form Follows Function

Well this should be obvious, and it is — when engineers design machines. Designers of organizations fail miserably at it. Compensation plans frequently encourage employee behavior that’s at odds with the organization’s goals. Accounting techniques encourage obstructive bureaucracies and political infighting. When we measure performance at all, we measure what’s easy to measure, not what we care about.
Usually, violations of the FFF principle stem from asking the wrong question. For example, “Should our analysts have an incentive plan?” The right questions: “How do we want our analysts to behave? How do we measure that behavior? How should we reflect its value in our compensation plan?”

Aligning Everyone to a Common Purpose

Well of course, but we have internal customers. Our job is to satisfy them. Somebody else deals with paying customers.

Unless every part of your organization embraces the same externally focused goal, your company’s products and services will lack focus and cohesion. That includes you. Here’s a test: what’s your industry? Information Systems? Or the marketplace your company participates in?

Request for Submissions

I’m collecting examples of ManagementSpeak (ManagementSpeak: “I’m not saying no, but I’m certainly not saying yes.” Translation: “No.”). I’ll publish the winners (and their definitions) in future columns.

Welcome to the IS Survival Guide. I hope you find it valuable.

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|In: Office Politics|Last Updated:

It’s Halloween, so Christmas can’t be far away, and you know what that means. Yes, it’s Bah Humbug season again! So here’s my list of the 10 worst trends in computing.
10. Consultants are now the source of all wisdom.
If you need to make an investment, you first add 10 percent in overhead by bringing in an independent consultant to tell the key decision-makers what you want them to hear.
Instead, let’s be each others’ experts. So if you need me to come in and tell your executives how much money they’ll make with computer-telephone integration — no problem! I must be an expert: after all, I wrote a book!
Let’s say you’re an expert too. If you say we should abandon our leased-line systems network architecture network and replace it with frame-relay-based LAN internetworking, so be it.
9. Emergence of the Internal Customer
This is the most idiotic notion in the history of business. Here’s the theory: If my outbasket empties into your inbasket, you’re my customer. You can make the same kinds of demands on my time and complain just as bitterly as a real customer when I don’t deliver on time.
Here’s a clue: Customers pay money for service!
IS groups exist not to provide assistance to their internal customers, but to work with their internal partners to provide better products and services to the company’s real customers.
8. Microsoft has become the new Japan.
Remember when American managers whined about Japan and how you couldn’t compete with it? Well, guess what? Now we have Microsoft.
Microsoft is a formidable competitor, largely because Bill Gates sticks with a product until it becomes a tough product to beat. As IS professionals take over the process of specifying software, many repeat their old mantra but replace IBM with Microsoft, as in “I won’t get fired for buying Microsoft.”
Now there’s a great reason for picking a product.
7. Evolution of client/server, part II: It’s soooo complicated.
Novell succeeded because once you set up your PC with a 50KB pair of drivers, the LAN looked just like a local hard drive and printer.
Look what they’ve done to the simple, elegant client/server model. It’s heartbreaking. Think about the simplicity of the LAN model, folks, and emulate it.
6. Evolution of client/server, part I: SQL.
Do any of you still think SQL was the right choice? I didn’t think so.
When you figure that Codd has 13 of his 12 rules of relational whatever, and that relational purists still flinch at the idea of an index, you get some notion of just how bad life has become. Add to that the underestanding that the power of relational databases comes from your ability to define tables independently and relate them as needed and you understand the power of mythology in our lives.
Face it, folks, SQL is a crying shame. Here’s an industry secret: To define a database, you have to analyze data relationships anyway. In a hierarchical or network database model, you maintain pointers. In a relational model, you maintain indices. The only difference: Pointers give you faster performance.
5. App is now a word.
Presumably because the cost of paper has risen over the years, several publications decided to save space by calling applications “apps,” as in “killer apps” or “great new app.”
I have a hard time deciding which is more noxious: over use of the word “cool” or trying to sound cool by calling applications “apps.”
4. Architect has become a verb.
Did you mean to say “design”? Maybe you meant to say “engineer.” The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees your right to say that you “architected a great system.” Say it to someone else. I think it makes you sound like a dweeb.
3. Free support now costs money.
Do me a favor. Print one number for use when your product doesn’t work as advertised. Print a different number for me to use when I need consulting support about how to use your product. Charge for calling that number.
2. GUIs are ushering in the end of the PC.
I have one DOS-based application I still use on a regular basis. Even when I don’t really need it, I sometimes launch it anyway, just to remember what snappy response time looks like.
Any semi-educated adult with an IQ in three digits could buy a DOS-based PC and puzzle out enough of the basics in an hour or two to get it running. DOS was simple enough for everyone.
You need at least a Ph.D., and probably a Nobel Prize to figure out OS/2 or Windows, and the problem is obvious: They have syntax, and syntax isn’t user-friendly. Bill Gates may be a genius, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out: One quick glance at SYSTEM.INI would tell anyone with an ounce of sense that this is a Rube Goldberg contraption just waiting to break.
GUIs certainly could have been great. Instead, we have huge, bulky, god-awful slow, multitasking behemoths on our desks so we can do one job at a time but have the rest sitting in open windows. It didn’t have to be this way.
1. Operation systems have replaced religions.
These are operating systems, not religions. I picked Windows despite my loathing for it because everyone writes for it! Got that? Windows and DOS have more than 80 percent market share, so the war is over! Let’s all agree that NextStep and QNX should have all of the market if there was any justice, and that if IBM had any brains they would have adapted Unix to the desktop instead of inventing OS/2. And then let’s get over it.
And I like this industry.

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